21 team single elimination bracket

Where the 11 byes go

A knockout bracket holds a power of two. 21 teams needs a bracket of 32, which leaves 11 positions empty, and each empty position is a bye: a team that does not play in round one and enters in round two.

The byes go to the top of the draw — to the seeded teams. That is the convention, and it is also the only placement that does not distort the bracket: scattering them at random would hand a free round to whoever happened to land next to one.

Byes do not add matches. The 21 above is one match per eliminated team, plus the third-place match, and a team that skips round one has simply not played yet.

How the day runs

Round of 32 (5 matches), then Round of 16 (8 matches), then Quarter-finals (4 matches), then Semi-finals (2 matches), then Final (1 match).

A knockout round cannot start until the one before it has finished, so the finish time above is optimistic in a way a round robin's is not — the last few rounds run on fewer and fewer courts. Two courts is assumed; a single court roughly doubles it.

Before it is played

The whole bracket exists from the moment you draw it. Positions that do not have a team yet carry the label the server wrote — "Winner QF1" and so on — so it can go on a projector on the morning of the tournament and be read as a plan rather than a grid of blanks.

Common questions